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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28211679">You Might Say Every One of Us Has a Shoggoth on the Roof</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/'>Anonymous</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Differently Morphous - Yahtzee Croshaw</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Complicated Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Crushes, Demonic Possession, Fluff and Humor, Internalized Homophobia, Kissing, Light Angst, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:53:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,352</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28211679</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Victor Casin encounters an incomprehensible horror which may drive him to utter madness, and also an Elder God.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ifrig/Arlgheen, Victor Casin/Adam Hesketh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Anonymous</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>You Might Say Every One of Us Has a Shoggoth on the Roof</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The existence of this work may be entirely attributed to what is likely a throwaway line in the novel, in which Victor snipes at Adam for having a “girl Ancient”. My brain took the path from “so how does that work then?” to the all-important “if Ancients have genders, do they also get crushes?” And once the existence of the physical book permitted me to spell everyone’s names correctly, well, there was really nothing to stop me.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The days following the Jessica Weatherby incident—or the ‘act of interdimensional terrorism against fluidics by a person of dual consciousness’ as the media liked to call it—were easily the most unpleasant and inconvenient of Victor Casin’s life.</p><p>Bad enough he was stuck in bed, eating bland hospital food and enjoying that special hospital lack of basic privacy and minimal cable channels. Bad enough Adam kept sitting by Victor like he was on his deathbed, making it impossible to scratch his balls without awkwardness. Bad enough that the insipid nurses kept telling him that he was at ‘increased risk for possession’, when he buggering well knew that already.</p><p>All this translated to, realistically speaking, was that Victor was bored out of his skull, and Ifrig was, well, quite a bit <em> louder </em> than he’d been in years.</p><p>And Ifrig was, if anything, <em> annoying </em>.</p><p>While Victor in general made a point of avoiding conversations with the other magically infused persons regarding their Ancients—a pleasant side effect of avoiding stupid conversations in general—he’d picked up the odd bit of information over the years, namely that Ancients, while being aware of human beings in the way most human beings tended to be aware of bread yeast, were quite aware of each other. There were probably libraries of musty tomes, written by barking mad historians, which attempted to outline the Gordian knots of inter-Ancient connections, which no doubt spanned the kinds of scales that made geologic time look like an egg timer set for a batch of boiling water. If these tomes existed, Victor had never read them, nor would he have cared to; he had enough difficulty remembering his PIN codes and passwords without trying to wrap his mind around the plot of <em> The Real Housewives of Yuggoth.</em></p><p>The problem was, sometime between when Victor had been newly manifested and this resurgence of Ifrig’s nattering, the Ancient had switched focus. No longer was he content to stick to classic and well respected possession activities: telling Victor to burn the world, murder everyone around him, ho hum. No, now Ifrig had a new object of obsession.</p><p>And that object was Adam.</p><p>No, not actually Adam, <em> Arlgheen </em>.</p><p>Yes, it turned out Ancients weren’t only capable of waging eons long wars, or masterful strategic campaigns against each other, that would have made the most convoluted tabletop RTS game played by dramatic teenagers appear as approximately complex as a round of Candyland. They didn’t limit themselves to nihilistic hatred so deep and vast it could blot out whole galaxies, or lofty heights of knowledge that drove mortals mad from merely trying to read the crib notes.</p><p>No, they also got <em> crushes </em>.</p><p>Adam had removed the tie holding back his hair, and was absently combing his fingers through the tangled red locks, now gone stringy because he needed to wash. Victor was ostensibly watching television, the newsfeed even so he could pretend to be doing something productive, but his eyes kept drifting back over to Adam, despite his determined efforts to fix them on the screen.</p><p>
  <em> You should help. Should touch.</em>
</p><p>Shut up, Victor thought, as loudly as he could manage.</p><p>
  <em> Nurse left a comb. Offer to help.</em>
</p><p>Bugger off, thought Victor.</p><p>
  <em> Want to touch.</em>
</p><p>No, <em> you </em> want to touch, snarled Victor in utter silence. You want to touch because you’re hung up on the tentacle bint that’s playing house in his thick noggin. Can’t the two of you go shag on a nebula or something and leave us alone?</p><p>An overwhelming wave of ethereal sorrow socked Victor in the stomach and left his eyes watering. Swearing aloud, he groped for the box of scratchy hospital brand tissues and tried to stem his leaking lacrimal glands.</p><p>
  <em> Cannot touch. Incapable.</em>
</p><p>“Victor?”</p><p>“Fine, I’m fine!” Victor said, tissue tearing as he rubbed frantically. “Just something in my eye. A big, buggering, <em> annoyance </em>.”</p><p>How the hell can you be some kind of all-powerful, eldritch abomination and incapable of basic interaction, thought Victor, furious.</p><p>
  <em> Incompatible on levels of basic matter. You are soft, sensory. Malleable but solid. The nerves in your hands an exquisite web. Touch him.</em>
</p><p>Don’t you mean <em> her?</em></p><p>
  <em> Them. You like them both.</em>
</p><p>Victor’s stomach clenched tight. Oh no, he thought, we are not going there. I already explained to you about <em> girls </em> . <em> Girls </em> are what we want.</p><p>
  <em> Lies.</em>
</p><p>I don’t care, Victor thought loudly. I’m not proving my dad right that I was a poof all along. I want girls.</p><p><em> And him </em>.</p><p>And it doesn’t buggering <em> matter </em> anyway because he doesn’t want <em> us.</em></p><p>Something soft brushed against Victor’s hand and he looked up through watering eyes to see that Adam was trying to offer him another tissue.</p><p>“Um,” Adam said. “Are you alright?”</p><p>Victor hadn’t gained anything so obvious as tentacles from Ifrig’s hanging about at the surface of his brain, thank God, but his perception appeared to have been slightly retuned, like an intermittent signal from a dubstep radio station intruding in over classical music. This close, he could <em> sense </em> Arlgheen inside Adam, in the way an animal could sense a distant storm, a faint, inaudible buzzing, which radiated through his teeth like a miniature dentist's drill.</p><p>Victor groaned and snatched the tissue from Adam. “Yes, I’m just experiencing a momentary bout of being-surrounded-by-idiots-itis. No, I’m not bloody well alright!”</p><p>“Should I get a nurse?”</p><p>“Not unless she’s going to give me a morphine shot and they already said they weren’t doing that!” Victor shoved the tissue against his eyes until unnatural colors bloomed against the blackness. “I just want to watch the news in <em> peace and quiet </em>but apparently that’s too much to ask.”</p><p>Adam paused, as if digesting this. “Is Ifrig bothering you?”</p><p>Victor pulled away the tissue to glare at him. “He’s <em> always </em>bothering me, you nitwit. All this nonsense has done is give him a megaphone.”</p><p>“Is he...telling you to do bad things?” Adam bit the tip of his thumb in thought and Victor loathed the way his gaze targeted this motion like a heat-seeking missile. “Should we...would you feel calmer if we restrained you?”</p><p>To his horror, in the back of his skull, Victor felt more than five hundred planets worth of squelching tentacles sit up and take notice.</p><p>
  <em> Ask him if he is into that.</em>
</p><p>“No I’m not bloody well asking him if he’s into that!” Victor howled. “I’m not asking anything on your behalf, you perverse, pulsating pile of octopus Perciatelli!”</p><p>Silence descended over the room.</p><p>Victor clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Adam said nothing, but after a long moment, he lifted an uncertain hand, making as if to place it on Victor’s shoulder.</p><p>“Touch me and I’ll burn you alive.”</p><p>Adam sighed. “I won’t if you don’t want me to, Victor. But…” He returned his hands to his hair and fiddled with the ends of it, perhaps contemplating how many inches he might lose if he said the wrong thing. “I wish…” he began, and stopped, as if thinking better of it.</p><p>The silence ate at Victor, even while inside his brain his instinct to shut this conversation down for the rest of eternity grappled with a soppy and meddlesome cosmic horror beyond the ken of mortal men. “Nothing to wish,” he said gruffly.</p><p>Adam’s gaze tracked to the window, through which could be glimpsed the stunning view of the brick facade of the building next to the hospital. “I did something,” he said, very quietly. “Something I wasn’t supposed to do.”</p><p>“I don’t want to hear—”</p><p>“I spoke to her. To Arlgheen.”</p><p>His next scathing remark died in Victor’s throat.</p><p>Adam shifted uncomfortably in his chair and pulled at his trouser leg. “Just...a little bit at first. But I started, I guess focusing on her, even when I wasn’t using my powers. Like when I’d see some pretty flowers, or hear a bird, or when I was eating something sweet. And then last week she said ‘that’s very nice, Adam’ while I was eating one of those pre-bagged chocolate chip muffins.”</p><p>Victor’s hand shot out and fisted in Adam’s hair.</p><p>“Ow! What the—” Adam yelped like a dog as Victor dragged him in close and began frantically searching his hair. “What the bleeding hell are you doing?”</p><p>“No tentacles,” said Victor, “there’s got to be tentacles. She’s in your head and the Weatherby brats went all cephalopod stylish. Where are you keeping them?”</p><p>“Ow—I don’t, there’s no tentacles! It’s fine, everything’s fine—Victor!” Adam pawed at Victor’s hands and disentangled them from his hair. He gripped Victor’s hands tight, his expression displaying a gravity and gentleness utterly belied by the bird’s nest Victor had just made of his head. “She was very polite. I explained the situation, told her I wasn’t prepared at this time to, uh, go all cephalopod stylish, but that I’d heard what Byhagthn had said, and that I didn’t have a problem...sharing the view, if you will.”</p><p>Victor stared at him. “And she what, agreed to sit in the back row and do nothing?”</p><p>“Yes. Well, not nothing. We do talk now and then. Sometimes she makes movie or dessert requests.” Adam swallowed and looked down at their joined hands. “The point is...I know. About her and Ifrig.”</p><p>Victor’s stomach dropped into the floor. But before he could grapple with the whining static snow that now occupied the space between his ears, Adam continued.</p><p>“It’s a little bit difficult...I didn’t understand what she meant at first, but he…” Adam bit his lip. “Your infusion, the colors around you, not just when you use your powers, but all the time, it’s really beautiful, you know that?”</p><p>In the back of his brain, from beyond the deepest reaches of the cosmos, Victor felt fathomless piles of tentacles pulsate with glee.</p><p>“Oh no,” Victor shook his head violently. “Oh no, oh no, we are not doing this. We are not, not—shagging so that a couple of lovestruck abominations can get their rocks off!”</p><p>Adam blinked gormlessly at him. “So you...don’t want to go to dinner?”</p><p>Victor opened his mouth, and closed it. “Dinner?”</p><p>“Well, we can’t exactly do dinner, but I was thinking I could pick up some takeaway? Arlgheen suggested fish and chips?”</p><p>“She’s giving you <em> dating advice </em>now?”</p><p>“Well it’s not exactly advice if you’re involved, now is it?” Adam grumbled. “Besides, I know it’s your favorite.” He held up his smartphone and waggled it meaningfully. “I thought we could watch <em> Point Break </em> while we eat.”</p><p>How had the cosmic bint known Victor’s favorite movie? Victor’s eyes widened in horror.</p><p>“You—you’re using our years of shared experience to seduce me!”</p><p>Adam cocked his head and Victor had the distinct, unsettling impression, in some terrifyingly undefinable way, of being watched by something <em> huge </em>.</p><p><em> “Is it working?” </em> Adam—no Arlgheen—no <em> they </em>said. </p><p>Victor’s head felt like it would burst. Heat crawled up along his skull, across his scalp, a violent, hot itching, like being bit by battalions of fire ants. His vision went white. He gasped in panic, sure he was about to experience spontaneous combustion. Static whined in his ears.</p><p>Then he felt cool hands on his burning cheeks and he clutched at human wrists like a drowning man. Hair brushed against his face.</p><p><em> “Ifrig,” </em> murmured Adam-Arlgheen, just against Victor’s ear. <em> “You need to calm down. You’re frightening him.”</em></p><p>Victor thought he might have been hyperventilating. His ears and cheeks felt scalded, and he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes.</p><p>A cool, flat, and vaguely sweaty surface pressed against Victor’s febrile brow.</p><p><em> “It’s alright,” </em> said Adam-Arlgheen. Victor could feel their breath on his face, their forehead pressed against his. <em> “We’re here. But you have to be gentle. You have to be respectful.”</em></p><p>Something enormous, and as confused as Victor himself, turned around in Victor’s brain, with all the poise of a prancing Highland bull entering a shop full of Wedgewood. It provoked a splitting migraine and Victor’s splutters of protest.</p><p><em> “Ifrig,” </em> admonished Adam-Arlgheen. <em> “Be. Gentle.”</em></p><p>The migraine receded, and Victor blinked at the tangles of red hair and patches of sweaty skin now mere inches from his eyeballs. Adam’s own eyes, while uncomfortably close, were the same bland blue they’d always been. No alien colors, no sprouting appendages, nothing to indicate that a being with the capacity to snuff out all life on the planet with an errant fart was currently using Adam’s brain as a personal stereoscope.</p><p>The creature currently using Victor’s brain for this same purpose burbled around in his grey matter like an octopus exploring an experimental tank filled with colorful toys. But Ifrig soon stopped when Adam-Arlgheen stroked Victor’s hair and murmured some kind of soothing nonsense, which Victor was supremely glad he couldn’t parse, as he would have been honor-bound to mock them for it.</p><p>And then Adam-Arlgheen smiled and kissed the corner of Victor’s mouth, and Victor-Ifrig dissolved into burbling octopus giblets. Thankfully, only metaphorically.</p><p>Some time later, squeezed next to Adam on the thin mattress of the narrow hospital bed in a position he abjectly refused to describe as “cuddling”, Victor leaned over, snagged an errant chip from the takeaway box, and scarfed it down. The Ancient in the back of his head made a little noise of intrigue, that sounded not unlike a bull alligator proclaiming his territory inside the Mormon Tabernacle.</p><p>
  <em> Good.</em>
</p><p>Of course it’s good, wanker, thought Victor. It’s fried potato.</p><p>Adam shifted beside him, briefly elbowing Victor in the ribs before settling. His hand petted at Victor’s hair, and the monstrous, unknowable cosmic entity that occupied Victor Casin’s brain purred with rapt contentment.</p><p>
  <em> This is good. Here. This moment. Time is a meaningless ocean. All moments are forever. All moments are now. But this one is good.</em>
</p><p>Victor reflected upon his position, filled with fried fish and potato, not-cuddling with his not-boyfriend, and with Ifrig, rather than screaming out demands for global incineration, instead politely watching from behind Victor’s eyes as Keanu Reeves fired a gun wildly into the air while screaming.</p><p>Yeah, Victor thought. This one is pretty good.</p>
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